Manuela Kinzel Verlag

The Book: An unusual gravestone at the Göppingen cemetery aroused the author’s interest and triggered a search for clues in her. It was erected for Isaak Komras, a young Jew, a teenager, and she wanted to find out how he came to be in this place where he had never lived. Available personal data was scarce, consisting of date and place of birth – Wilna, today’s capital of Lithuania, Vilnius – and date and place of death – Heidenheim, a town in the region. The inscription on the grave stone reads “Former concentration camp prisoner.” The author set out on a virtuak journey which took her to Wilna and its ghetto, slave labor in some Baltic states, on to Stutthof, in 1944 a shunting yard for Jewish slave laborers, then to south west Germany and its oil shale project. Finally Isaak, together with a cousin who had been his companion in tribulation and others, was liberated but not before he was forced on a death march. Together with the cousin and other family members who joined them, they ended up in the Heidenheim DP camp. He passed away less than six months later, without getting a chance to tell his tragic story.

The Author: Sybille Eberhardt, born in 1945 in Geislingen, Germany was a teacher for German, history and music for grades 5 to 10. Early on she was involved and published several papers for the local historical society. After her retirement, while researching her family history, her focus turned to German-Polish relations, the result being the study “The Koszuszek Murder”, and deriving from that, the documentary play “The Pole must go!” In 2019 the State of Baden-Württemberg awarded her second prize for her work “When the ‘Boat’ turned slave ship” (the English edition is available as an e-book by her publisher), which deals with the fate of Polish Jewish female slave laborers for a regional but internationally renowned company, WMF.